Lion City

I’ve never known an airline, with exception of some of the mainland Chinese carriers, that have built housing for its workforce and provided schools for airline employee families. Lion Air, which is Indonesia’s largest low-cost carrier, is doing just that.

It is building a township, dubbed Lion City, on the outskirts of Jakarta that will have more than 150 dormitories for its cabin crew and 1,500 housing units for pilots and airline employees with families. Lion City will also have a school that will open in July. By the end of August everyone is due to move into their homes at Lion City.

I went and visited Lion City in early March and took these pictures.

Some of the dormitories, for female cabin crew, are already open, as is a new cabin crew training center. I also saw Lion’s new corporate headquarters being built. It is due to open in August. Currently, Lion’s main office building is in downtown Jakarta. Lion City is actually further away from downtown Jakarta than Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, which means staff living in the center of Jakarta will have a long commute to work each day come August. But if they want, staff can have the choice of living at Lion City.

The other reason Lion decided to build the accommodation is that some of its more lowly paid employees were pushing for wage raises and complaining about the rising cost of living in Jakarta. Transportation and housing costs are two of the biggest expenses Indonesians have to deal with. Lion City is being built to mitigate those costs.